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Sexual behavior in humans differs from that of most other mammals, including most other primates, in that we have nondetectable ovulation and sexual consciousness. Sexual attraction, norms, and attitudes are tied up with cultural concepts of personality and standards of beauty as well as individual psychologies. This difference may have evolved early in hominid history as a mechanism to increase and strengthen the direct involvement of males in the care and raising of offspring, in other words, to add males to the standard primate family unit of females and young. Sexual interest would add to the motivations for forming a personal, emotional, and economic bond between parents. Connected to this was the evolution of bipedalism, which helped facilitate mobility and the acquisition and sharing of resources that were part of this bond. We may glimpse the antecedents of our sexual behavior by looking at our close relatives, the bonobos. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species, and many of our dimorphic features may be understood in the context of the different roles that would have been played by males and females among the early hominids. Other features make sense as clear, visible signs of one's identity as an individual male or female. Still other traits, shared by both sexes, can be seen as evidence for the importance of personal sexual attraction having replaced the automatic, innate reproductive signals of most primates. Sex refers to the biological characteristics of and differences between males and females. These differences are translated by cultural systems into the identities and roles of men and women. We refer to these categories as gender. Gender categories differ widely from culture to culture and from time to time. The universality of two cultural phenomena—marriage and the parent-offspring and brother-sister incest taboo—may be explained as cultural manifestations of biologically based themes: the cooperative bond that was the adaptive focus of the evolution of our sexual behavior. |